Accessibility.
An informed citizenry includes everyone. Civic Intelligence is built to be usable by readers who navigate with a keyboard, a screen reader, magnification, or with motion reduced — and we treat accessibility as a requirement, not a feature.
Our standard
We target Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA as our baseline. Accessibility is checked as part of building and reviewing every page, and we treat a failure to meet AA as a bug to be fixed, not an acceptable trade-off.
What we build in
- Keyboard navigation. Interactive elements are reachable and operable with the keyboard alone, with a visible focus indicator and a skip-to-content affordance.
- Screen readers. Semantic headings, landmark regions, descriptive link text, and alternative text on meaningful images.
- Reduced motion. Our scroll and count-up animations honor the
prefers-reduced-motionsystem setting and gracefully stop animating when it is on. - Color & contrast. Text and essential UI meet AA contrast ratios, in both the light and dark themes, and information is never conveyed by color alone.
- Mobile first. Every chart and interaction is designed to work by touch on a phone, with targets sized for fingers.
Known limitations
Some story pages embed third-party content — YouTube videos, X (Twitter) posts — whose accessibility we do not fully control. Where an embed is essential to a story, we summarize its substance in the surrounding text so the reporting stands on its own without the embed.
Report a barrier
If any part of this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, we want to know and we will fix it. Email editor@civicintelligence.news with the page URL, what you were trying to do, and the assistive technology or setting you were using. We aim to respond within a few business days.